While healthcare practitioners have become increasingly attentive to the problem of functional health literacy, there is little evidence from the published literature that public health practitioners have grappled with the challenges of limited literacy skills among populations of interest. There are many possible explanations for why public health practice has been slow to reflect the importance of this problem: for example, the lack of consensus about what is meant by health literacy, the "one-size-fits-all" approach that characterizes mass communication efforts, the dearth of research and evaluation literature demonstrating the efficacy of campaigns carefully crafted to reflect the literacy skills of the target audience, the failure of public health training programs to produce graduates with health literacy skills. We undertook a best practices study in which we asked public health professionals from around the U.S. to nominate programs that have seriously attempted to address health literacy issues. We surveyed an array of public and voluntary sector agencies and organizations and asked for information on exemplary programs. A subset of these programs were selected for further study and analysis. We will provide a detailed description of the results of that study.
Learning Objectives: 1) describe several different ways in which failure to address health literacy in public health practice adversely affects programs 2) provide examples in which public health programs have been been tailored to address the health literacy abilities of their target audience 3) list the essential elements of best practices in public health literacy
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: None
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.